Ireland: Part Six – Sligo

This is the sixth post in a series documenting our photography trip to Ireland in 2014

Sligo

Markree Castle’s property(click to view full-size)

Next was Sligo County, where William Butler Yeats did most of his poetry (often featuring the land). It was also my birthday, so my wife had booked a castle-hotel instead of the more common and cheaper B&Bs we had been staying at. The hotel looked very promising from the outside, as opposed to just a modern building with crenelations added on top. It actually was a real castle once. But the inside had been so over-renovated that it looked disappointingly like any other old hotel.

Parker’s Castle(click to view full-size)

Sligo itself is mostly forest. I don’t want to contradict Yeats; there are some beautiful lakes and a few interesting mountains in the area. The weather was the wettest and gloomiest of the entire trip, however, and we were tired of the grey, so we mostly just recharged at the hotel. I’m sure on a better day the experience would have been much more adventurous. Our highlight was seeing Ralphie from A Christmas Story sitting at the pub table next to us (eyes still safely intact).

We did visit a castle ruins called Parke’s Castle, which was interesting from a historical perspective, and the rough patina of grass-patched stones gave the Dynamic Tone setting more exercise.